By Douglas Wissing, Foreign Policy
If observers had any doubts about the failure of the U.S.
counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, the past several days should
have put them to rest. Since Feb. 21, anti-U.S. protests have erupted in
virtually every major Afghan city over the revelation that American
personnel had burned Qurans at Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S.
installation in the country. The demonstrations have at times turned
violent, claiming the lives of at least seven Afghans. This wave of
protest is just the latest example of how the United States has botched
its attempt to win “hearts and minds” in Afghanistan, and another
indicator that its war effort is heading toward failure.
But that’s not the message you would hear from U.S. officials. To
hear them tell it, the United States has already taken action to prevent
such shocking displays of cultural insensitivity from happening again.
“When we learned of these actions, we immediately intervened and stopped
them,” U.S. General John R. Allen, the commander of the international
force in Afghanistan, said in his apology. “We are thoroughly
investigating the incident and we are taking steps to ensure this does
not ever happen again.”
If this episode sounds familiar, it should.
Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis has traveled over 9,000 miles across
Afghanistan to learn a simple lesson: public statements made from
podiums in Washington and Kabul bear little resemblance to the reality
of the Afghan war. The 17-year U.S. Army veteran spent most of his time
in the insurgency-enflamed provinces in the east and south, and was
shaken to discover the U.S. military leadership’s glowing descriptions
of progress against the Taliban insurgency did not jibe with the
accounts of American soldiers on the front lines of the war.
Davis then did a remarkable thing for a U.S. Army officer: He went
public. In January 2012, he began a singular campaign to bring his
findings to the attention of the American people. Davis wrote two
reports, classified and unclassified, that aimed to expose the failures
of the Afghan war while not endangering lives in the process. “I am no
WikiLeaks guy Part II,” he wrote.
Davis’s reports have become one of the most damning insider accounts
of the U.S. military’s handling of Afghanistan. In his unclassified
report, he wrote that U.S. officials have so thoroughly misinformed the
American public “that the truth has become unrecognizable” and that,
during his recent year-long deployment, he saw “deception reach an
intolerable low.” In his view, the divergence between the upbeat
accounts offered by the top military leadership and the deteriorating
security situation in Afghanistan has undermined U.S. credibility with
both allies and enemies, cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of
dollars, and inflicted death, disfigurement, and suffering on tens of
thousands of soldiers with “little or no gain to our country.”
Davis briefed members of Congress and journalists on his conclusions,
and also took his case to the media. In his article, “Truth, Lies and
Afghanistan: How Military Leaders Have Let Us Down,” published in the
venerable Armed Forces Journal, Davis candidly summarized his charge
that military leaders are misleading Congress and the public. He asked:
“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not
succeeding?”
As an embedded reporter in eastern Afghanistan, I have spoken with
hundreds of U.S. soldiers and civilians in forward operating bases,
combat outposts, MRAPs, dining halls, hooches, tents, helipad terminals,
and the U.S. embassy. And after years of interviewing both military and
civilian personnel who had been, or were currently, deployed in
Afghanistan, I have come to share his conclusion that top U.S. officials
aren’t leveling with the American people.
In Kabul, U.S. officials work to spin a failing war as a success
story. The military called their Kabul press briefings “feeding the
chickens,” gatherings where press officers handed out releases and
briefers fed upbeat reports to hungry journalists.
The situation sometimes isn’t much better out of the Kabul bubble: In
Khost Province’s Forward Operating Base Salerno, a determined press
officer briefed me—in the bunker-like brigade headquarters—on what he
contended were declining numbers of attacks and improvised explosive
devices (IEDs). The headquarters was designed to withstand a direct hit
by a Taliban rocket—the insurgents attacked the base so many times that
its nickname was Rocket City. You could buy baseball caps on the base
embroidered with that name, and a descending rocket.
Unfortunately, the reports were often at variance with what was
happening out in the provinces. As I made my way around eastern
Afghanistan, soldiers and officials told me a story at odds with the
official narrative—one of rising levels of support for the Taliban,
rapidly deteriorating security, a corrupt and incompetent Afghan
government, scandalously wasteful U.S. programs, and a failed
“whole-of-government” campaign to coordinate U.S. military and civilian
efforts.
American soldiers and the civilians did manage to work successfully
together in one area, however—to scrub the news sent back to Washington.
Phyllis Cox, who served as the Kabul embassy’s chief of party working
on governance and rule-of-law issues from 2004 to 2006, blasted the
Kabul embassy’s dysfunction and duplicity. “[T]he conclusions are spun
for domestic consumption,” she told me. Meanwhile, staffers were
required to toe the party line. “They are punished for getting out of
line—made persona non grata, whatever. It’s easier for them to just put
in their time.”
Jim Moseley, who worked on Afghan agricultural development as the
deputy secretary of agriculture from 2001 to 2005, agreed. “The point is
they knew what headquarters wanted to hear. Things got sanitized,” he
told me. “They knew what Washington wanted to hear.”
But Davis contends America’s top soldiers, not its diplomats, bear
much of the blame for painting an unrealistic portrait of the Afghan
war. As Davis wrote, Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony to the Senate Armed
Forces Committee on March 15, 2011, is a textbook example of how the
military misled the U.S. public. In his upbeat briefing, General
Petraeus indicated that the U.S.-led coalition had arrested the
Taliban’s “momentum”—a vague descriptor that, Davis noted, “you can
neither prove nor disprove.”
Petraeus also artfully provided himself with a handy escape clause
for a future collapse in stability. “[W]hile the security progress
achieved over the last year is significant, it is also fragile and
reversible,” he told the senators. But as Davis rightly points out, the
data that indicates the insurgency had grown dramatically in recent
years. According to the Afghan NGO Safety Office security report that
was published in late 2010, the total volume of insurgent attacks
increased by 64 percent over the year—“the highest annual growth rate we
have recorded.”
On the front lines, American soldiers were similarly convinced that
the insurgency was growing. At one point, a U.S. officer quoted me the
Special Forces dictum: If an insurgency isn’t shrinking, it’s winning.
Scarcely a half-mile from the giant U.S. base at Bagram Air Field, I
stood in the dry, brown landscape with Maj. Eddie Simpson. Soldiers
under the command of the lanky officer were guarding development
specialists as they conferred with village leaders from the town of
Usbashi beside a small river. One of the Afghans said Usbashi was
pro-government, a peaceful place. “You can take off body armor here,” he
said.
Simpson snorted. “Those rockets came from this village a few nights ago,” he said, referring to a recent attack on Bagram.
A white Toyota Corolla and two motorcycles suddenly charged down the
dirt track toward us, then abruptly plunged into the shallow stream and
roared up to an overlooking bluff. The soldiers watched as the cyclists
dismounted and a pack of men erupted from the car. The Afghans stood on
the bluff like imperious Sioux warriors scouting the cavalry. “Taliban,
checking us out,” Simpson snarled. He had earlier spoken about the
Soviet Union’s ill-fated experience in Afghanistan: “It didn’t work out
so good for the Russians here,” he told me. “It ain’t working out so
good for us. These people don’t like anyone.”
Touted as an essential element of counterinsurgency, the ballyhooed
Afghanistan aid and development projects have had no measurable impact
on the insurgents. For example, lobbyists in Washington promoted a
wildly expensive project, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, to
finance roads through Afghanistan with the perky slogan: “The insurgency
begins where the road ends.”
However, these corridors were soon strewn with Taliban IEDs. One
major paved route in the eastern province of Khost became so heavily
mined with roadside bombs that the U.S. commanders closed it to military
traffic.
American troops are also increasingly cynical about the mission to
prop up the profoundly corrupt Afghan government. Working day in and day
out with Afghan officials whom they knew often funneled American
taxpayer dollars to the Taliban, U.S. soldiers and civilian officials
were guaranteed to experience cognitive dissonance. “We are funding our
own enemy,” soldiers in eastern Afghanistan sardonically told me.
Multiple government reports buttressed the stories that soldiers told
me: the insurgents were benefiting from payoffs from U.S. development
and logistics contracts. “It’s like we’re financing the Taliban,” an
angry soldier told me as we rode through Taliban-controlled Ghazni City
in a mine-resistant vehicle with a detachment of Texan troops “We had a
veterinarian truck hijacked. Had to pay $6,000 to ransom the workers. We
think the contractor was working with the Taliban.”
Military leaders have long emphasized the importance of the Afghan
National Security Forces (ANSF) to the U.S. exit strategy. Since 2002,
the United States has spent $20 billion training, equipping and
sustaining the Afghan army. An April 2011 Pentagon report claimed that
the ANSF “continued to increase in quantity, quality, and capability.”
Given the army’s abysmal baseline, Petraeus’s statement was not exactly
untrue—but it did wildly overstate the ANSF’s ability to ensure Afghan
security.
The overwhelmingly illiterate Afghan army simply doesn’t fight very
well. In Khost Province, it was common knowledge that Afghan army forces
seldom ventured from its base at Camp Clark. In the eastern province of
Laghman, I watched disheveled Afghan recruits reluctantly shamble
toward the base’s gate as their frustrated U.S. Army trainer barked
orders. Later that day, at a pre-mission meeting with American soldiers,
the team leader played a popular YouTube video of uncoordinated ANA
soldiers unable to do jumping jacks. The tough U.S. soldiers cracked up:
“These guys are going to beat the Taliban?” one hooted.
Many American soldiers in Afghanistan are coming around to Davis’s
views. As happy news about successful counterinsurgency efforts
continued to pour out of the Washington and Kabul press offices,
frustration and anger are rife on the ground in Afghanistan.
“On an operational level, the soldiers are saying, ‘I’m going to go
over there and try to not get my legs blown off. My nation will shut
this bs down,’” a Marine officer in southern Afghanistan told me last
year. It wasn’t just that his soldiers had lost confidence in their
Afghan partners, they had long since lost faith in counterinsurgency’s
focus on hearts-and-minds development work.
“Marines say, ‘f—- this,’” the officer remarked. “The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”
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